During the Chainlink Spring 2022 Hackathon’s opening ceremony, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov congratulated participants on entering the “world’s biggest arena,” inspired by Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 “Citizens in a Republic” address. “We find ourselves in the arena where all of the world’s value is being reconsidered,” Nazarov said. “What our industry is saying is that you can have a cryptographically guaranteed deal about everything.”
Chainlink is web3’s leading oracle solution, providing decentralized market data, computation, randomness, and automation to smart contracts. Since the 2021 Spring Hackathon, Chainlink launched new infrastructure like Chainlink Keepers, which triggers vital time- and event-based functions, enabling participants in this year’s Spring Hackathon to invent entirely new use cases for smart contracts.
Indeed, several of the Spring 2022 Hackathon winners, including Chainlink Services Prize winner, PolyNodes, and DAO Prize winner, 0xAudition, built projects implementing Chainlink Keepers.
The complete list of Chainlink Spring 2022 Hackathon winners was announced during yesterday’s closing ceremony.
“A lot of you came to this new,” said Chainlink Labs’ Lead Developer Advocate, Patrick Collins. “There were new challenges here. There were new development tools you worked with, there were new problems you solved and I am just so proud of everybody here.”
Continuing Chainlink Hackathons’ growth trajectory, this year’s Spring Hackathon was the largest to date, with over 8,500 signups from new and experienced developers in more than 20 countries and 340 complete project submissions. The event also featured 50 hours of live educational content created specifically for participating developers.
Over $540,000 in prizes was awarded to projects across eight major categories including the $40,000 Grand Prize awarded to VMTree, the $25,000 NFT and Gaming Prize awarded to NUSIC, and the $25,000 DeFi Prize awarded to DeFi for People.
Grand Prize winner VMTree is a novel conceptual framework for 10x gas optimization on the blockchain, combining SNARKs and hyper-reliable Chainlink nodes to create a new paradigm in verifiable computation that enables low-cost, private transactions.
On the project’s Devpost, teammates Brad Czerkies, Cedric Heidt, 4vedi, and twister dev emphasized the “higher calling” of a “team of strangers” who “share a common vision and coordinate to execute it in reality within a short time frame.”
“There is a high concentration of such individuals dispersed throughout the Chainlink ecosystem,” the team wrote. “This project was only made possible by the incredible Chainlink community that joined the Spring 22 Hackathon.”
“VMTree absolutely blew us away,” Collins said during the hackathon’s closing ceremony. “Chainlink enables this system to have this 10x gas efficiency by moving a lot of that computation off-chain and allows for a lot of that anonymity. Oracles are absolutely fantastic for doing things like this. We are really, really excited to see what this protocol does in the future.”
View the complete list of Chainlink Spring 2022 Hackathon Winners.
Watch the entire closing ceremony.